Add Water and Stir: Adoption Records & Documentation

On the next episode of Add Water and Stir, ABM and Mimi explore issues related to adoption records and documentation. The amount of paper involved in adoption seems endless. Once you plow through one stack of records or documents, another pile awaits. If you thought that all of the paperwork drama ends after finalization, well, you might miss some important things about finalization documents and what they say and mean.

Recently the Add Water hosts noticed posts on Facebook support groups and blogs about finalization practices that produce documents that scrub the existence of the first family. Adoptive parents and adoptees express a continuum of emotions about revised birth certificates that suggest the adoptive mother gave birth to the child. Some aren’t bothered by it, while others are weirded out by having a document that says they gave birth when they did not or were birthed by folks that did not birth them at all! Post finalization documents can also be emotionally messy.

When coupled with various limitations on adoptees’ ability to obtain their own personal information, post-finalization, revisionist documentation can result in a mimicry of the lost histories of the African American experience. Tracing lineage for African Americans can be particularly challenging given how we were counted as property rather than persons up until the end of the American Civil War. Sounds heavy and messy right? Yeah, it can be.

So join us tomorrow night on Google Hangouts to chat about documentation at 9pm EST/8pm CST! You can also catch us after the show on our YouTube Page, Itunes and Stitcher!

Have some show thoughts? Feel free to drop ABM a line at adoptiveblackmom@gmail.com or Tweet her at @adoptiveblkmom!

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